


for a restless heart

by belatrix



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 10:35:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15192914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix
Summary: They don’t sleep.Jon sits through the night and the rain trying not to watch her through the rear-view mirror, and she looks outside the window and does something she might have loved as a child, like count the stars.[Jon and Sansa, running away.]





	for a restless heart

**Author's Note:**

> Precious babies who forever think they're siblings in various modern settings will be the death of me.
> 
> Added warning: there's a hint of Petyr/Sansa, and the faux-incestuous undertones that come with that as well.

 

 

 

“I’ll keep you safe,” Jon tells her, in a motel room, in the car, in a half-lit bathroom, out on the open road. “I’ll keep you safe.”

In another version of the story Sansa turns away, gravitating just out of his reach, suspended in the place between his arms and the fractured horizon of the world beyond ―and doesn’t need him, only that would be a lie, so maybe it should go like this: she doesn’t want to need him.

In another version of the story Sansa lets herself smile, a half-hearted curl of the mouth that stretches across her face like an old, worn mask. Tells him, _there’s no such thing as safety_. She thinks someone said this, once.

Those alternatives are scattered in the wind; buried in the ground with her siblings; rotting beside her father’s head; locked tight and wasting inside a birdcage.

In this story―

“I know,” she says, takes his hand in hers. “I trust you.”

 

 

 

He is twenty-one when they see each other again, their silhouettes outlined in a frantic embrace against the white moonlight coming through her open window. She is eighteen.

(They are both far older than that.)

 

 

 

Somewhere in the beginning, there is a girl who’s not entirely sure she wants to be rescued. In high-school, she always dreamt of a life like something out of a movie, the glittering sun and the glittering sea of California, so far away from the sharp cold of home, a beautiful house, a beautiful husband, a beautiful life.

(There is something terribly cinematic about being the princess in the tower.)

But this is life and it’s nothing like a girl’s dream and she should have died but she didn’t, and this is not a tower.

Petyr marries her aunt and whisks Sansa away to a house on a cliff two states away, tells her, “you’ll be safe here.” His fingers are light on her back, on her wrist, brushing down the side of her arm.

In a flash of painful, ironic clarity, she almost laughs. It seems all everyone has ever wanted is to _protect_ her. Keep her like a butterfly pinned to a dissection board, a moth fluttering about inside a mason jar.

Somewhere along the way, she watches her aunt fall from a balcony, wordless scream echoing in the hills, and Petyr holds out a hand for Sansa to take. She hesitates for the space of half a heartbeat; she’s shaking on the floor and above her, his eyes are looking at her and straight through.

(There is something terribly cinematic about watching a murder.)

This new house becomes her world, its walls the borders of her existence. He dresses her in silks and velvets and furs and says, mournful, how terrible it is that she cannot keep her red hair. “My sweet daughter”, he says, introducing her at a party, a secret smile tucked right in the corner of his mouth, meant only for her, not quite touching his eyes.

He doesn’t call her that when they’re alone, except when he does.

Somewhere toward the end―

there’s a boy climbing up to her bedroom like a thief in the night, scrambling along tree branches, gloved hands grabbing at her windowsill. He’s dressed all in black, and Sansa thinks, _he has a scar_. His face was young and snow-pale when she last saw him, a child as much as she had been, and now he has a scar.

“We have to hurry,” he says, “I’ll get you away,” and his voice breaks on a rushed exhale, choked, “Sansa.”

She throws herself in his arms, her nightgown catching at his belt, at his dark coat, and he hugs her close, crushes her tighter against his chest.

(There’s something terribly cinematic about running for your life.)

 

 

 

At a diner in Arizona, the waitress smiles at them with dimples, warm and motherly, tells them they’re a cute couple.

Jon makes a low, humming sound that could be anything, and Sansa turns her face away, lets her hair fall down over her profile. She still hasn’t washed out the brown dye, and her picture has been on the news. Her name, too ―her real name, but it’s been flashing across TV screens ever since Petyr took her away after the wedding, and no-one recognized her then. Not when she was posing as Alayne, and so they aren’t going to, now.

( _People see what they want to see_ , Petyr told her once. It must have been one of the first days. She thinks it just might be one of his lessons she’ll try not to forget.)

Jon drinks his coffee and she eats her pancakes even though the taste is cloying, catching at her throat, too sweet and too warm, her knees jumping restlessly underneath the table, her fingers busy with the silverware.

“Are we going to go back home?” she asks quietly, a whisper, and wills the words back as soon as they’ve left her mouth. There is the unspoken truth weighing between them, pressing down like a physical thing: _there is no home left, not for us_.

They’re alone. Together, and alone.

Jon simply swallows, his palms going tighter still around the coffee mug. It’s burning his fingers, she knows, steam wafting off of it in scalding white waves, but he doesn’t let go, as if he can’t quite remember what too much warmth feels like. The world just outside the tiny diner must be alien, painful to him; a vast, crawling desert, painted in reds and ochre, an unforgiving expanse of dust and dirt and everything their home was not.

“I don’t know,” he says, dark eyes blinking, moving to meet hers. His voice is so much rougher than she remembers. As if he’s been shouting, or crying. “Anywhere but here.”

She pushes a fork around her plate, draws abstract patterns in the pooling syrup. “Starks don’t fare very well in the south,” she says. The sky beyond the dirty window is a different sky from home, too; a bright, vibrant blue, not a single cloud marring it. It looks nearly fake.

There, on his face, a slight curl of the mouth that on someone else might have been the beginnings of a self-deprecating smile. “I’m not a Stark,” he says, looks away, and drinks the rest of his coffee.

 

 

 

They keep going.

They can’t afford to stop, not now, not ever.

The weather’s still too hot, too foreign, and the warm wind beats against the car, an unforgiving thing, tries to sway it ―but Jon’s hands on the wheel don’t falter, they never do, as if he’s waging a silent, determined war against nature, as if he’ll go mad if he doesn’t manage to keep at least one thing in his life steady.

Sansa brings her legs up on the seat, arms hugging her knees close to her chest. She lets her head fall against the window, closes her eyes. If he did sway now, her head would bang against the glass; but he won’t. She trusts that he won’t let himself falter, and tries to sleep.

It’s a restless slumber, the leather of the seat sticking to her thighs and her forearms with sweat, the car shaking because the asphalt needs to be paved, the sound of the tires on the road and the rattling of forgotten change on the console ringing in her ears. She drifts in and out of her uneasy half-sleep, slides quick glances at his pale profile, tired and determined against the bone-dry sky beyond the window, sharp, never changing.

“Do you want me to drive?” she asks, and it sounds too loud in the confined space between them. He looks at her over his shoulder, dark and unblinking, and she’s suddenly aware of just how exposed she is in this heat, her shorts too short and rising up her hips, her tank top scooping low on her breasts.

His eyes dart back to the road ahead. “No, I’m fine.”

“ _Jon_.” She eyes him, prolonged and wary, can’t miss the dark circles under his eyes, the way his hands are maybe a breath too tight on the steering wheel, knuckles nearly turning white with his hold on it; the unnatural stiffness of his shoulders, all the way down his spine. She breathes out, a sound caught somewhere between wariness and exasperation. “Just let me drive. You’ve been at it all night, and I was just sitting here sleeping. We must have gone through three states already.”

She tries to give a little laugh at that, do _something_ to draw some of that pressing tension off his body, and she looks at him expectantly ―maybe his lips will quirk up, just a little, in a fractured small smile.

They don’t. He just gives her another quick, fleeting look, “we’re still in New Mexico."

“Oh.” She slowly lets her legs unfold from her arms, off the seat. The world ahead is nothing but grey asphalt and never-ending yellow lines and an unnameable, colorless landscape blurring past. “I should still drive, Jon. You _need_ to get some sleep.”

“I’m fine, sis,” and it comes out as a sharp, stuttered exhale, no real bite in it. He flexes his fingers for half a second before he resumes his unwavering grip, staring out at the road. “Do you _know_ how to drive?”

She leans back into the seat, contemplates kicking her bare feet up on the dashboard. “I’m eighteen, Jon. Of course I know how to drive.”

It’s him saying it this time, “Oh,” soft and unfocused, something nearly pained, nearly nostalgic, sliding across his face. She realizes it, the exact same moment he does; just how long it’s been. How much it is that they don’t know about each other, uncountable days and miles of memories and blood and wars hanging in the air between them.

As they pass another mile marker and Sansa rests her head against the window again, she thinks that it doesn’t quite matter. Their lives are there, etched onto their faces, and they can read each other’s expressions better than they can anyone else’s; maybe because their eyes are hiding the same kind of exhaustion; maybe because the same tentative hope is tucked, carefully, carefully, inside a secret corner of both their hearts, somewhere where no-one can touch it, save for them.

Sansa almost reaches out a hand to touch him. Almost. “Just tell me if you want me to take the wheel, alright? It’s okay to let me help you, you know ―it’s okay to need help. And I’m ―I’m _me_. I’ll help you.”

Jon swallows down nothing. She watches his throat move, his mouth tighten. _This is a moment_ , she thinks, as the engine speeds up. It could be something big, or terrible, or beautiful. Sansa has always cared about beauty and the importance of things; and she’s always left feeling like no-one else ever does.

This could be a moment, and then Jon’s hands are going slack, his hold on the steering wheel loosening, easing up ―and there’s a slight, barely-there curve to his lips, sudden and quick, a smile for her. Just for her, and it’s real, blooming softly, subtly, all the way up to his eyes.

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

 

 

 

Jon has a gun.

She doesn’t see the flash of it under his jacket, never spies it strapped carefully to his belt. Sansa finds out in a half-empty parking lot, on a moonless night just as they’re nearly out of Kansas.

One moment she’s returning to the car, arms full of bags of chips and water bottles. And the next there’s a man, and a calloused hand over her mouth, an unfamiliar, urgent voice telling her to be quiet. He’s taking her back to Littlefinger, he says, the promise of easy money swimming in his dragged-out vowels. Be quiet, and he won’t hurt her.

She doesn’t scream when she hears the gunshot; there’s been plenty of that in her life. (Back in Los Angeles, she watched as one of the Lannisters’ men put a bullet through her father’s brain.) She doesn’t scream when she feels his blood, warm and sudden and thick, whip in stray drops across her face.

Her ears are ringing but her vision’s clear, everything sharp and heightened, and she hears the bags of chips crunch under her sandals as she steps away from the body. She doesn’t remember dropping them.

“Sansa,” there’s Jon’s voice, everywhere, eclipsing everything else, drowning out all thoughts, and the gun still in his hand, catching and reflecting the streetlight in shocks of silver. She watches as his boots smudge into pools of blood. “ _Sansa_ , are you okay? Did he hurt you? Did he touch you? Sansa―”

“I’m fine,” she breathes out, lets herself go slack into his arms, her gaze dropping to the gun, the blood. “He didn’t do anything ―Jon, I’m _fine_.”

And suddenly there’s just his face, the horror and the shock painted across every line of it, and she knows it’s not because of the corpse on the ground. She knows this without being told, as surely as if it were a physical wound, a bleeding curl into her flesh, that Jon’s killed men before. But she can see the fear bleeding through his irises, all the way across his veins, and it's a fear for her, that has his hands gripping her tight like a vice, holding her too close, frantic, terrified―

She puts her hands on his chest. Soft, slow. “I’m not hurt,” she mutters, close to his mouth, and she’s trying to calm him down as much as herself, and they have to leave _now_ , “Jon, I’m not hurt.”

 _Not when I’m with you_ , she can’t bring herself to say. This is not a movie; this is not a song; she’s not particularly convinced anyone can keep anyone truly safe.

“Okay,” he says, breathes the word against her skin as he wraps his free hand around her neck and leans down to kiss her forehead, barely-there and lingering. She feels him shudder under her palms, fingers still splayed across his heart.

 

 

 

The first time:

They are standing in the middle of the open road, a blur of asphalt stretching out ahead like a split ribbon, dark, unending, and the car with the doors open and the keys in the ignition somewhere to their left.

They had been fighting, the silences between them cut with an unnamed, simmering tension until everything cracked; Jon pulling the car over with his knuckles white against the steering wheel, Sansa’s nails digging into the seat.

 _Where are going_ , she’d kept saying, _do you even know what you’re doing_.

She doesn’t quite catch how it happens but they’re suddenly nearly shouting at each other from across the road, the sun a bright, scorching thing hanging from the sky, weighing down on them, and she wants to _shake_ him, because she needs to know he knows how to do this, that they’re not just children running towards nowhere, that she’s not going to lose him like she’s lost everyone else, that she knows him, that―

She stops, suddenly. Just like that, she deflates, all her fury and her worry leaking out from the cracks, out of her, leaving only numbness behind. Sansa’s losing track of the story. She doesn’t remember what version this was supposed to be.

Jon’s left staring at her, a figure in black, sharp and tight with anger under the sun, too pale, too harsh for this heat. It had been so long since she’d seen any of her family that Sansa had almost forgotten how out of place they all looked, away from the cold.

And she just doesn’t know what to _do_ , so she closes the space between them, walks up to him and feels the scalding heat of the road under the too-thin soles of her shoes. Tangles her fingers through his, and he lets her, and he only says, “Sansa.”

An odd, unbidden thought: she doesn’t have nearly enough memories of him saying her name. Of him looking at her, straight in the eyes, unwavering. They were never close as children, as a family, not back home.

She hugs him, throwing her arms around his neck without preamble and pulling him against her, because there are too many words lying just under her tongue and if she lets them out they’ll get tangled and broken, not the way she wants them to sound, and she doesn’t want to ruin this, because it’s the only thing she’s got.

Her brother, and his car, and his heart, and the road; nothing, and everything.

“I’m sorry,” she mutters against his skin, because she is. Sorry for shouting at him, sorry for letting him take her away and paint a target on his back in blood-red, sorry for leaving home, she’s sorry, she’s sorry. _I take it back_ , she thinks frantically, burying her face into his neck. _I take it all back_.

He pulls a little away, and there’s his hand in her hair, careful and wary, like he doesn’t quite remember how to be gentle, like he misses being gentle more than anything in the world. “No, I’m―” he’s looking at her and then he isn’t, his gaze slipping down to her lips, “I’m sorry.”

Sansa breathes. Wonders if he’s realized he’s staring at her mouth.

And he kisses her.

 

 

 

They spend the night in the car. There’s rain coming; Sansa can smell it in the air, can feel it in her bones.

Jon curls in on himself in the front, doesn’t even lean back his seat, giving Sansa the whole backseat. It’s cramped and cold and uncomfortable and at some point she almost starts shivering, and he untangles himself from under his leather jacket, turns around and lays it carefully over her body. Like a white knight’s cloak, she almost thinks, but doesn’t. Sansa blinks, once, twice, and stays silent; tries not to breathe in his scent as it swallows her, as she pulls his jacket tighter around her and tucks her chin into it.

They don’t sleep.

Jon sits through the night and the rain trying not to watch her through the rear-view mirror, and she looks outside the window and does something she might have loved as a child, like count the stars.

 

 

 

Jon smells like sweat and leather and cheap motel soap. He tastes like a bite of liquor and second-hand smoke and he kisses her like a confession, like an apology, a sincere, desperate crushing of his mouth against hers.

She lets her fingers touch his cheek, runs them softly down his face, his pale, exhausted face that’s too solemn and too hard, far too used to blood to even try and be anything but.

 _Don’t be sorry_ , she won’t say. _You’re the only one who’s never hurt me_.

She bites down on his lip instead, trails a hand under his shirt, across a familiar plane of muscles and scars. Hears his sharp breath, the way his grip on her waist closes down, a quiet, guilty kind of violence in the way he holds her.

“This isn’t―” he bites out, hoarse and hot against her open mouth. “I don’t―”

 _Don’t ruin it_ , she thinks.

 _Don’t take this away from me_ , she thinks.

“Don’t talk,” she says, fingers fumbling with his belt, the sound of metal and zippers filling the room like the aftermath of a gunshot. There’s something going a little cold inside her, kicking inside her chest.

She bites him again, just to be sure.

 

 

 

Jon came back from a barren expanse in Alaska with new lines around his eyes and a sharpened blankness to his stare, the kind that you don’t pick up unless it’s beaten into you.

Jon came back from a war he was far too young to fight in and far too young to be drafted for, with a new gun on his hip and a head full of fractured nightmares and an emptiness in his chest that didn’t really have the right shape to be filled.

Jon came back from a nomad’s camp in a no-man’s-land with black tattoos on his knuckles and leather on his shoulders, and the ghost of something like a lost love lying supine just right behind his eyes.

Jon came back from a makeshift hospital room thrown haphazardly together under dirty army tents, with an open wound messily stitched up above his heart and a newfound exhaustion that almost, almost pushed everything else out of his head.

Jon came back for Sansa.

She can’t not think this, let it curl inside her: _Jon came back for her_.

(Jon came back, and came back, and came back―)

 

 

 

In a dark, damp motel room in Iowa:

They are in the same bed. This means precisely what an onlooker might think it does.

Sansa looks up at the ceiling, an unnameable shade of grey that might have been white, once. Her fingers clutch rough sheets, her mother’s ring catching at the fabric. “This was a mistake,” she says, because she can’t not say it.

Jon breathes out, soft and tired. Jon is always tired.

(The thought that’s slipped through; one day he might get tired of her too, and Sansa doesn’t know what she’ll do then.

He’s said he would never leave her, could never, not now that they’ve become the true north of each other’s compass. And Sansa, well. She can do nothing else but trust him to be telling the truth.)

 _This was a mistake_ , and now she’s thought it, said it, felt it echoing off cheap, yellowing wallpaper.

She feels the mattress shift and creak, turns her head on the pillow to see him push himself off the bed. Slowly, carefully, as though something might break. Sansa’s gaze slides across the pale, hard expanse of his back, stops at the pink scratches running in jagged lines between his shoulder blades, left behind by her nails.

 _I did that_ , she thinks abruptly. _I did that to him._

“It was,” he says, and it’s torn from his throat like a cough, too rough with emotion to sit in his mouth right. That same mouth that touched every inch of her bare skin, only minutes ago; kissing, biting, urgent and reverent and not nearly guilty enough, not then.

Sansa turns on her side, the sheets moving with her body, pooling around her. There’s a low, humming ache between her legs, the faint traces of his stubble against her thighs. It’s one of the sweetest, wrongest, most wonderful things she’s ever felt. It’s terrible, and it’s _right_ , and it’s―

He runs a hand through his hair, still not looking at her, and in the weak, stuttering lamplight she thinks it might be shaking, but can’t be sure. She watches him pull a black shirt over his head, and then the scratches on his back are gone from her sight, disappeared under it.

When she thinks back on this moment, she’ll remember this: those crooked lines dug in by her nails, covered by black.

He stands up as though to prove a point, maybe to himself, maybe to no-one; and he hovers on his way out of the door, one hand outstretched but not yet reaching for the handle. He has his back to her, but there’s something harder in the slope of his shoulders, now. Something tense.

And he’s only just _standing_ there, like he’s waiting for something to happen, for Sansa to say something, do something. She knows she could. She knows maybe she ought to.

She could tell him she’s sorry, and it’d be a long list of things to apologize for, her nails digging into his skin written in red on that list, and it’d only be a half-truth. She could ask him to leave her; if she calls the police now they’ll take her back to Petyr and her aunt’s house on the cliff and her bedroom with the gorgeous, priceless furniture and the locked door ―or maybe they’ll take her to the Lannisters, all the way back to Los Angeles, where her body might be thrown next to her father’s ― either way Jon will be free of her, of the burden of keeping her safe, no-one would come after him. She could turn away and curl in on herself on the bed and cry, because she can’t remember the last time she let herself do that, and the urge is there, sometimes, clawing up her throat, rattling right behind her teeth; even he seems to have forgotten that she’s capable of crying. She could get up and kiss him again.

“Will you get some food?” is all she says, pulling the covers over her chest even though he’s still not looking, keeping his stare resolutely ahead. “I’m starving.”

He doesn’t answer, but he returns half an hour later with two bags of Chinese take-out, a bottle of Coke and a bag of ice from the motel lobby, pushing the door shut with his elbow as he walks quietly inside the little room. She’s still naked and wrapped in a dirty sheet and she makes room for him on the bed, doesn’t bother to turn on the ancient TV sitting on the single table on the other side of the motel room, next to the bathroom door that doesn't close quite right.

They eat in silence, positioned carefully apart on the narrow mattress so that their knees don’t touch.

 

 

 

In the unlit, grimy bathroom of a gas station, she holds her head over the cracked sink as Jon helps her wash the faded brown out of her hair.

“It’s dangerous,” he said. “Sansa, this is dangerous. Your face’s been on the news.” He said it in the car, and he said it in the last three motel rooms, and he’ll say it again.

He’ll keep saying it, she knows, until they reach the Starks’ old associates in Chicago ― _they’ll help us_ , he promised, _for Robb, and for father_.

“I want to be myself,” she said. “I don’t want to hide anymore,” she will say.

She’s still not sure which version of the story this is.

Jon’s fingers brush against the side of her throat as she leans further down, lets the water splash at her scalp. It’s freezing, an ice-cold shock deep in her bones, but she prefers it this way.

 

 

 

(The first time:

she’s been trying not to cry, and he’s pretending not to have noticed. They’re in the backseat of the car, at a place that is nowhere in particular and not close to any point on the map except for the road, and it’s as terribly cliché as it sounds, his leather jacket and her cut-offs thrown haphazardly away, her hair everywhere, falling over his face.

She’s moving above him and he’s moving with her, his arms wrapped around her and holding her almost violently close, her hands crushed against his chest, the pads of her fingers fluttering over raised, jagged scars.

Sansa doesn’t know what to call this, so she decides it’s love.

Just that, love, no room for anything else, no place for shame or guilt or horror between their bodies. That will come later. His nails digging into her waist, her teeth biting down on his neck where the soft red beginnings of a bruise will bloom, his half-pained breath, _her_ half-pained breaths, the sharp sting when he first lowered her down on him, let himself slide inside her ―that’s love, too.

At some point, she makes a choked sound in the back of her throat that might have been a sob. He pulls her tighter down on his own body, and kisses it away.)

 

 

 

It’s Valentine’s Day.

This means absolutely nothing (but it used to mean something, once).

Sansa remembers the adolescent giddiness, sweet excitement, giggling with her friends at the cards and the chocolates they received from secret high-school admirers. It’s a fond memory; but shallow, useless, irrelevant to who she is now.

She tries, consciously and with method, not to hold any affection for the girl (child) she used to be.

She’s waiting in the car outside a convenience store, the window rolled down and the wind rustling her hair. The weather is finally chilling, grey, fitting. She’s wearing boots again, like she did back home. Boots, and a coat, and thick leggings under her dress. They're nearing Chicago, and it’s as if she can breathe a little easier, now.

Jon comes out of the store in a flurry of dark leather and hair, arms full of cans and plastic bottles and paper bags, and she opens his door for him from the inside as he walks up to the car and dumps the bags unceremoniously in the back. And―

“Here,” he says, low and hoarse and he’s looking just a little to her left, not quite meeting her eyes. He holds out a single rose; it isn’t impressively beautiful, or very bright or healthy, but they’re running low on money and flowers are expensive.

Sansa is quiet as she reaches out a hand to take it. Its petals are a soft, pale blue.

“It’s just like the ones back home,” she says, and her voice cracks a little, somewhere in the middle. There’s something catching in her throat, tightening between her bones. “A winter rose.”

Jon’s sliding into the driver’s seat, his shoulders moving into something far too tense to be a shrug. “I was feeling nostalgic, I guess.”

 _He’s trying_ , Sansa thinks.

(Jon’s always trying.

Maybe that’s the one thing that remains true, in all versions of the story.)

Sansa leans forward before she’s thought it, the rose still clutched between her fingers, and kisses him softly on the cheek. “I know,” she says, her free hand touching his arm as he starts the car. “Thank you.”

 

 


End file.
